COMPOP 30.6 - JKPOP

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"We inheritors of Western imperial colonialist privilege like to call Japanese pop music 'Jpop' and Korean pop music 'Kpop', which, let's face it, is barely even one step less racist than the term 'world music'. Still, in the global economic marketplace, it serves its purpose, delineating the genre with exactly the exoticity it requires to sell the product back to the other-hungry West. Buttress O'Kneel, with her usual blend of philosophical profundity and whimsical absurdity, takes both terms and mashes them together to form 'JKPop', also harnessing the conceptual power of the shorthand internet term 'JK' - meaning, of course, 'just kidding'. Which is how Ms O'Kneel has always presented her craft to the wider community - as both a serious act of political detournment and cultural anarchy, and as novelty pop music.

Buttress' 'JKPop' takes the best-selling music in the West - the record-smashing Korean behemoths Black Pink and BTS - and reconfigures it into slash-and-burn glitchfests, amen-fuelled breakcore spakattacks, heavy rap productions, and randomised abstraction, mixing the Korean stars with vocals by Clipping, Metallica, Marc Rebillet, Boston, Billie Eilish and more. Fragments of recognition fly past, versions of versions fall apart, and we're left bewildered, paranoid, exhausted, and sore. 'But don't worry," says Ms O'Kneel, "I'm just kidding!' "

Department of Ephemeral Overanalysis
IWML
2021

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NOTES FROM THE ARTISTE:

GENERAL NOTE:

i am in a band (The Fruiting Body) and friends with a 13 year old, so i am subjected to a LOT of BTS and Black Pink whenever we hang out. rather than complain, i decided i'd do what i always do, and incorporate all it into my own music instead. so this whole album is kinda my response to the immensity of the whole Kpop phenom. btw, is it cultural appropriation when a Kpop band rips off middle-eastern tunes? or do i need to work out the geopolitical power balance between the Middle East and Korea before i can know? i do not know anything any more.

SPECIFIC NOTES:

1) funny Marc Rebillet song, cut with Black Pink. then i took it and re-cut it with the instrumental of the Black Pink track. then i re-re-cut it with an 8-bit version of the song i found online. i love that Black Pink say "it's a bird" in the song. nice coincidences like that continue to delight.

2) BTS song meets Clipping acapella. grabbed a bunch of Clipping acapellas so the album has a few - helps make it all cohesive or whatever.

3) pure mashup of Lovesick Girls instrumental and How You Like That vox, both by Black Pink. there's always something fun about putting the wrong vox by the same artist over themselves - loved doing that since 2003 when i first stuck Eminem over Eminem.

4) ran the BTS song 'Boy With Love' through the beatmachine online tool, and st it to swap every 2nd and 4th beats. then i took the resulting thing and fucking breakcored it.

5) Pretty Savage by Black Pink meets Little Molly by Tommy Cash.

6) 'Lovesick Girls' by Black Pink again fucked with and turned into music for a Clipping acapella, which was then reprocessed in audiomulch (which ended up being much longer than the song was, so it ends up with this long weird glitchy tail that i really dig). i love fucking with the same music in multiple ways - it's like, nothing is ever 'finished', culturally-speaking, because as long as we move forward in time, someone will do something to something and make it new again. no matter what, people will art, and everything is fodder. the present will be remixed into the future!

7) took that first track and shoved it through the WubMachine, set to 'swing'. then i cut that with the sound from the filmclip of 'Bury a Friend' by Billie Eilish. oh yeah, the young people call them 'MV's nowadays don't they, not 'filmclips'. it's hard to keep up.

8) i noticed that there was a bit in 'Lovesick Girls' that kept reminding me of a bit in 'Shortest Straw' by Metallica (i was a Metallica fan in high school, don't judge). so i did the thing. for some reason it always really tickles my fancy when i put James Hetfield over a dance beat. never gets old. (tiny bit of Boston's 'More Than A Feeling' over the very end bit because it had a vocal space and that fit nicely.)

9) people are making 'orchestral' versions of tracks now. sweet! so i grabbed someone's orch version of the BTS song 'Black Swan' and sped it up and breakcored it. then i took some of Black Pink vocal noises and plopped them in appropriate places. then i processed the vocals from the Black Pink song 'Whistle' (where i'd grabbed a whole lot of those noises) and audiomulched them for added frenetic. then i distorted this layer, so there's this weird distorted glitch layer over the whole song, which spills out at the end. so yeah, all that noise at the end, it's actually pop vocals. the things one can do these days!

10) vocoded the 'How You Like That' vocals with the 'How You Like That' instrumental, a la 'Vocode Yourself' from the previous album.

11) literally just ran the BTS song 'Make It Right' through the beatmachine and turned every beat backwards.

12) the first track re-cut with Azealia Banks' killer 212 track. 'guess this cunt gettin eaten' has a new meaning in the context of the granny-eating flamingo, which is completely coincidental, believe it or not - but of course once i realised, i seized it with both hands. also mixed this version with an orchestral version of 'How You Like That' because why not.

13) track 5 shoved through the Wubswinger. not sure i did anything else to it.

14) i took the pure mashup 'Lovesick Like That' track and cut it into other pieces, rearranged them, and made a new piece outta them.

15) literally just track 9 octaverted. oh, i also cut the noise section at the end off because really, octaverted noise is still just kinda noise. but then i stuck that noise at the end of the 'Baby Spinach' track as a rising sound to lead into the final stupid random track, so, yknow.

16) a really pretty BTS song ('Blue and Grey') gets the 'glitch and Clipping acapella' treatment. the original Clipping song is called 'Body and Blood', and has this sample saying 'body and blood', which was missing in this acapella version i had. so he's like 'all she wants is' and then the sample goes 'body and blood', but all i got was silence. so then i was like, okay then, but to hold the album together i can just use more of that Marc Rebillet flamingo song, so i took the bit where he says 'baby spinach', so now it's like really fun and dumb. i like it. it's the most beautiful music with these really stoopid vox now. it's the perfect way to end the 'JKpop' thing, really...

17) ...which is why it's ruined by like 12 minutes of pure randomness! oh no! what are you doing Buttress? basically i took like a chunk out of every song on the album and then ran them all through the beatmachine, set to 'random'. so it's like the opposite of an overture for the album - it takes all the bits of the album and mixes them all up, so we get a disjointed weirdo cut-up mix that holds the whole album together and ruins everything for everyone. the worst kind of deja vu! but i really like it, and like it more every time i listen to it, so... it stays. i had to do it in chunks, because the beatmachine didn't like my 12 minute file, so it's not really random - it's randomised theme sections or something - but maybe that makes it more listenable? although it's not that listenable - you want it to be over and you check and you're not even halfway through. and some sections are more random than others i think. anyway, hope you get something out of it.

until next time...

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